Climate Change - A Spiritual Issue

On Tuesday 24 November, Bishop Nicholas gave a lecture at the prestigious College of the
Bernardines in the heart of Paris’ Latin Quarter. This was the latest in a
series of talks leading up to the UN’s COP21 talks on climate change which will
begin in Paris on Monday 30 December.

The previous speaker in the series was
the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan and the next speaker will be His All Holiness
the Ecumenical Patriarch. Bishop Nicholas is the Church of England’s
lead bishop on environmental issues.

The talk, entitled “Nature and Man in the
Image of God” discussed climate change as a central issue in Christian
theology.

He discussed what Scripture says about what
it means to be human; the growing ecumenical convergence on the importance of
climate change; the convergence of theology with science, politics, and economics
on climate change; and climate change as a moral and spiritual problem.

Some extracts from his talk are below:

“Even people who do not have a religious
faith have identified climate change as a spiritual problem but the nature of
the spiritual problem seems to me to be variously understood.

“The scale of the environmental challenge
sometimes feels too big to face. It feels impossible for us individually to
make a significant difference. A mixture of futility and fear causes us to bury
our heads in the sand. We despair.

“There is also a very serious problem that
we have lost the link between the words we use and what we actually do. St Paul
would have recognised the gap between beliefs and actions. In his letter to the
Romans he wrote that “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want
is what I do” (Romans 7.19).

“I sometimes wonder if what is really being
asked for in this yearning for spirituality is a bit like the spirituality of
Alcoholics Anonymous. We won’t even be
able to begin unless we realise our circumstances are so serious that we have
reached ‘rock bottom’, when we know that it can’t get any worse for us. Unless
we acknowledge the terrible mess we are in and our need for the support and
solidarity of others, we will not be able to work our way through a 12 step
programme designed to help us in recovery. The prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous
is that God will give us the courage to change the things we can change, the
grace to accept the things we can’t change, and the wisdom to know the
difference.

“The use of energy stored in
fossil fuels has given us marvellous developments. We have made rapid progress.
Now we live in a new era, when climate change is caused by human activity,
particularly the use of fossil fuels. That which has been good for us is now a
mixed blessing. It is creating new dangers. We need a spirituality that will
nurture and sustain our best minds, courageous hearts and a strong collective
will to make an even more rapid transition to a low carbon economy for the
health and salvation of the world.”